Under Rishi Sunak, freedom goes up in smoke

While the prime minister wants us to believe he’s making a break from the UK’s failed political consensus, his generational smoking ban is just more of the same old infantilisation of adults.

Cover image from Freedom: Up in Smoke? by Simon Clark. Artwork by Jan Bowman.

Rishi Sunak’s speech to Conservative Party conference yesterday was all about positioning himself as the man who would take the tough decisions. But there was precious little in terms of policy announcements. So, it is striking that one of the few concrete policies he did announce is so illiberal that most people would have seen it as bonkers until very recently. It makes Simon Clark’s forthcoming contribution to Letters on Liberty, Freedom: Up in Smoke?, very topical - and we’ll be discussing it at the Battle of Ideas festival in London later this month.

Sunak declared that ‘to ease the more fundamental burden of demand on the NHS, we need more preventative care to stop people having to go to hospital in the first place. We must tackle the single biggest entirely preventable cause of ill-health, disability and death: smoking.’ Given that the past 50 years have seen nothing but attempts to restrict smoking, there’s not much left that can be done – except ban the purchase of tobacco altogether.

And prohibition is what he went for. ‘I propose that in future we raise the smoking age by one year, every year. That means a 14-year-old today will never be legally sold a cigarette and that they - and their generation - can grow up smoke-free.’ It may be a rather glacial form of prohibition – potentially a 15-year-old could legally buy tobacco for the next 70 or 80 years or more – but it is prohibition, nonetheless.

It is striking that the only country in the world to have announced a similar policy is New Zealand, always at the vanguard of illiberal public-health ideas, most pointedly demonstrated by Jacinda Ardern’s zero-Covid policies during the pandemic. That Sunak should have wanted to be seen to be aligning with such a figure gives the lie to the idea that he is a break from the same-old, tired politics. When Sunak derided Labour leader Keir Starmer as ‘the walking definition of the 30-year political status quo’, he might as well have been describing himself.

The drip-drip smoking ban doesn’t make much sense in its own terms. First, if you want to tackle the ‘fundamental burden of demand on the NHS’, you don’t start with a policy that takes years to really come into force and possibly decades to have much effect on NHS demand. It’s even questionable if smokers – who do tend to die younger – really add to the NHS’s burden, given that they won’t live long enough to need the extensive health and social care their tobacco-dodging peers will.

Second, it creates ludicrous anomalies. In 10 years’ time, that 14-year-old will be 24 and banned from buying cigarettes, but their 25-year-old friend will be just fine. Sunak will create a cohort of young adults having to ask friends and family to buy cigarettes for them.

Third, like any form of prohibition, it will further stimulate the black market in tobacco, already doing quite nicely due to the eye-watering taxes imposed on a pack of ciggies. Losing all that tobacco tax will actually make funding the NHS harder.

But these issues are, in many ways, mere details. The real question is about freedom – the right of adults to make their own choices, even when those are the ‘wrong’ choices in the eyes of the public-health lobby and government ministers. This policy betrays the political establishment’s view of the nation’s citizens: as children in need of protection from ourselves.

As my Academy of Ideas colleague Ella Whelan pointed out in an article for the Telegraph last month: ‘Coercive public-health measures like this suggest that our relationship with the state should be passive, with our individual choices made by a scientific committee producing stats on life expectancy and risk. Banning smoking isn’t really a health measure at all, it’s a judgement on the capability of a public to express their own agency.’

We’ll be discussing this policy and more at the Battle of Ideas festival on 28 & 29 October at Church House in London. There, Simon Clark, the director of smokers’ rights group Forest, will be discussing his contribution to the Academy of Ideas pamphlet series, Letters on Liberty, titled Freedom: Up in Smoke?, which will be published just before the festival. (View session details here.) Keep on eye on this Substack for details of when the next edition of Letters on Liberty will be available.

To find out more about the Battle of Ideas festival and to buy tickets, visit the festival website. Free subscribers get 10% off tickets with promo code SUBSTACK-BOIF23. Paid subscribers can get even bigger discounts by using our Associate rates.